


we let love be a call in the night

by thefirewildling



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, PTSD tw, Rare Pair, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Timeline What Timeline, self harm tw, still canon I guess, this is angsty af but happy ending I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:21:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25822069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefirewildling/pseuds/thefirewildling
Summary: “Missed me that much?” He whispers tiredly but with a hint of mirth anyway when he feels how hard her fingers curl into the fabric of his jacket.“You fucking idiot,” she whispers against his neck and Gale feels something tugging at him again, a warm trickle rattling his ransacked chest cavity, something that thrums in his chestthat isn’t guilt.(They are: Soulmates in a war, paired up like it was something empty, like love is nothing but wounds and half-lives. But they've always been more than heavy prints on skin anyway).or; Gale, Johanna and the same-bruise soulmate au no one really asked for but I had over 19k words to say
Relationships: Gale Hawthorne/Johanna Mason, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Comments: 22
Kudos: 150





	we let love be a call in the night

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah so, quarantine aired these movies a lot and it got me thinking. A few notes:
> 
> 1) there was supposed to be a timeline I swear, but there are some canon divergences in this so who knows
> 
> 2) no one ask me how bruises actually work, there's probably a shit ton of medical inaccuracies in this I'm so sorry
> 
> 3) this entire thing was written to the soundtrack of london grammar and taylor swift's folklore so make of that what you will
> 
> 4) I'm sorry about any typos or incongruences!!!
> 
> 5) I keep adding to this whenever I think of something , I’m so sorry
> 
> 6) title from ry x's salt, for all your musical desires

i.

Not everyone gets soulmates, he knows that. So when he gets home from school one day, his knees bruised and with his arms and hands covered in tiny cuts that clearly aren't his doing, his mother smiles a little wistfully and his dad pats him appreciatively on the back. "She's out there somewhere, son".

Gale smiles – of course he smiles, he’s 11 just turned and District Twelve has yet to become stagnant and suffocating for him. He extends his arms towards his father for inspection. “What does it tell me?”

His father takes his arms, runs an expert finger over the wounds, softly as though not to hurt him, and Gale eyes him expectantly, awaiting verdict.

"I think-" he starts, a familiar proud, paternal gleam behind his eyes, and yet there's a hint of something else – a certain fondness, a certain forlorn. His parents aren’t soulmates, it was never much of a discussion at home. His dad used to say that it is better this way, with his mother never having to endure on her skin the cruelty of working at the mines. Soulmates are a dying breed, especially after the rebellion. Very few people have them, and even fewer find them. "I think she's from a working district."

His dad kneels in from of him, his big hands gently covering his skinned knees. “Oh, and she likes climbing trees.”

ii. 

His father dies not too long after that, and it is certainly not long until his own wounds start mapping his skin alongside hers. The skin on his hands feels tender and rough to the touch, the bruises on his knees remain, but the cuts on his arms decrease notably.

She’s learning.

(As is he, who puts his name on that god forsaken bowl a few more dozen times and learns how to hunt to be able to keep his family from dying).

Katniss Everdeen comes bursting in though his life, too. Sharp and glaring and every bit as ardent as he is and _oh so easy_ to be around, with both their fathers dead at the hand of the same explosion. They exchange knowledge, game, and in time, some laughter too. But she has flushed fingers and the bruise of an occasional slap across her face and Gale cannot help but to feel a little cheated.

He doesn’t ask her about it, doesn’t really have the guts to. He’s barely 15 and he’s a little sad, a little angry too, and doesn’t want his whole future dictated for him. The unchanging ache of things stomps him hard across his chest – doomed to be a miner, doomed to starve, doomed to have a family that will starve with him.

“Do you ever want to just leave?” His fingers fiddle with the grass at their feet, finds himself unable to look at her.

She laughs of course, dismissively, as she always does when he tried to bring up any subject as heavy as this. “Right, and how would we feed our families?”

 _We wouldn’t_. But it’s a thought too selfish even for him to vocalize. Gale stays quiet then, presses his lips together to suffocate the anger and stop him from saying something he’ll regret. “Right.”

Katniss gets up then, the bow at her back slapping against the leather of her jacket almost comically as she heads out for the nearest tree and starts climbing it to pick up the oranges, and all Gale seems to be able to think of is that he really doesn’t wants to be doomed from the start.

iii.

Johanna Mason is barely two years older than him and gets a rating of 3.

Mostly, she dissolves herself into sobs for the entirety of her interviews and spends days hidden in an old oak on the brink of starvation because her sponsor clearly gave up on her. She leaves the cornucopia crying but unscathed and carrying a small axe.

Katniss scoffs at any public display of weakness. “What good will it do her if she doesn’t know how to use it?” But Gale figures there is something to her, he can’t exactly place what it is though, like a fire simmering, racing beneath her skin.

It happens at the end of the school day, as they gather in the town square for the mandatory viewing of the day's events. His mother joins him, with Posy perched on her hip, Vick and Rory clinging to her tail like frightened children. Johanna Mason climbs down from her tree holding her axe and charging towards the four remaining tributes. Proving them all wrong.

In District Twelve no one cheers, this isn’t the Capitol and the death of children isn’t something to root for, but the gasps of surprise as the small, crying, starving girl from District Seven performs her first kill are unmistakable. The canon goes off and she lingers for a moment before yanking her axe from the boy’s chest and hiding out in the bushes.

Gale’s eyes are glued to the screen, as are everybody else’s. A career from District One makes out her figure and charges for the kill, thinking what every single one of them is thinking: that there’s three people blocking his way home and she is one of them. He slashes her below the collarbone with an exuberant knife, actually aiming towards her heart but missing it completely. 

It happens, as Gale gaps in horror as the blood stains his own shirt, a sharp pain tearing through him at the heart.

"Gale!?" His mother rushes towards him, panic splattered all over her expression, words hushed and lost to the commotion. "Gale, what is it!?"

The wound keeps spilling out more and more blood, he feels his owns hands slipping in it. He struggles to find words as fear climbs up his chest. "It's not – It's not me, mom."

It's hers.

It's hers. On the screen.

His mother's eyes widen in recognition as Johanna Mason remains unbothered by her own wounds, adrenaline pumping through her as she axes yet another tribute across the stomach, their blood matting the ends of her hair. Johanna has the eyes of Panem on her, and amidst the gaps of horror and the claps of those who recognize her some merit, no one pays attention to them.

No one knows.

His mother’s hand against the wound is warm, but the skin on his chest is starting to numb and his vision is starting to blur. They leave, his mother sidestepping people in the crowd, everyone too fixated on Johanna to ever think of his pale face as something other than an ill stomach at the gore.

They stumble their way to Mrs. Everdeen as Johanna is being crowned the victor of the 71st Hunger Games.

iv.

In the years that follow, Johanna Mason is a secret he keeps not so dearly to himself.

It scares him half to death.

It’s not that she killed. He’s positive that should he ever be unlucky enough to have to go through what she has gone through, he would kill just the same. She killed to get back home, to the parents that ever so reticently hug her on live television as she leaves the train station in District Seven, home to the brothers who perch her up on their shoulders and to whom she offers the echo of a genuine smile.

He doesn’t judge her. He can’t.

Yet everything feels different.

Johanna smiles to the camera. It’s indulgent and composed and the complete opposite of a girl who murdered four teenagers with her bare hands. The people in the districts chant her name, press cameras and microphones to her face and she offers them a wordless lackluster smile with flushed cheeks and tired eyes.

He feels the gaping absence of her wounds now. Years of skinned knees are erased as if overnight and are appropriately replaced by the bruise of bad shoes. She gets her ears pierced and his fingers hurt whenever she has her nails done.

She’s living in the Capitol now, he guesses. Living the life of eternal glory they promise to their darling victors.

He doesn't really think about her. She's like a living, breathing concept - beyond distant. Practically royalty for anyone who might care.

(She has less scars now, probably had them surgically removed, and the make-up plastered on her face makes her look like a little girl and does its job of fooling everybody. But he keeps his scars, the one at the collarbone throbs occasionally with meaning, and the bags under his eyes are bruises too, worn and frayed).

(Lines appear on his wrists that bleed and sting. One is deeper than the other, but neither require stitches. He knows what they mean).

(District Twelve is the first stop on her victory tour. A cut to the arm, the prickle of a finger, it would be that easy. Instead, he spends his Sunday with Katniss, at the edge of the woods, feasting on a small piece of warm bread he managed to trade from the baker. Katniss laughs and laughs that day, telling them the stories of Lady and that horrid cat her sister keeps, and he feels full of almosts. As he looks at her, he realizes he doesn’t want to be fated, doesn’t need to be. He wants to live his own life, wants to make his own choices).

(She’s here now. He clings to it).

v.

Johanna’s games are considered the most interesting of the past ten years.

At least until the star-crossed lovers of District Twelve come into the picture.

The entire Capitol is in an uproar, and it is probably the most publicized event since the Dark Days. Debates are held, Capitol psychiatrists and soulmate experts are called in to discuss. It takes soulmates being reaped for everyone to start questioning the validity of the games.

_Will they kill each other if they must? Do they suffer double the pain? Will they ally because skin to skin touch speeds up the healing? Can they even stand up after their better half as died?_

Of course, they argue, the pain of a soulmate bruise is but an echo of their actual pain, and the emotional devastation one feels after soulmates die is anything but medically comproved.

Still, he finds himself thinking about Katniss’ mom, unable to get out of bed to feed her daughters. Writhing and dying because of that agonizingly loud absence on her skin.

(Gale swallows his feelings raw, terribly aware of everything he’s taken for granted. A dark-haired girl whose leather jacket glistens under the sun. Katniss, soft in the fading light).

(Gale thinks it will kill him if she dies).

(It will also kill him if she comes back home sobbing over somebody else’s corpse).

As Caesar Flickerman so lightly puts it: “We just have to hope none of them makes it. I personally cannot bear the thought of a sad victor.”

Soulmates are a mystery, the Games aren't. And in the end, the Capitol’s desire for bloodlust is what shines through, and everything follows through as it should. If Panem just wants itself a good show, then what truly better than the classical tragic love story?

And the people do go delirious. There are roars of outrage and tears flowing openly in the streets; rules are bent for them, and then bent again. Deep down, Gale knows she is doing everything she can to survive, knows that some part of it is nothing but an act and that his Katniss isn’t as naïve or as innocent as the girl she is portraying to be. But some part of him knows better – that she has always been a terrible liar and that the fondness and the astonishment with which she looks at the baker’s boy cannot be faked.

(The thought lingers at the back of his skull, _what are you against a collection of bruises?_ )

(Johanna just mentors now. The cameras focus on her from time to time to give Panem a flash of a familiar face and he pretends he doesn't search for her whenever they broadcast the reapings in District 7. But it’s been 4 years, and there's a limit to how much he can lie to himself. Her composure is long gone, and so is her ability to hold her tongue. The Capitol knows this too, refraining from asking her too much and from airing whatever judgemental comment she has to offer besides _not being paid enough to be on TV_.

(Her tributes are dead the moment they reach the Justice Building and Johanna laughs bitterly on the stage when they shake hands in front of her. She's the only one who laughs, her mouth twisted cruelly to the side and she leaves the square before anyone else does). 

(More than anything, she reminds him of Haymitch Abernathy, who Katniss seems adamant on keeping alive - not really altogether there and perhaps dead long before their tributes will ever be).

He kisses Katniss when she gets back, one part of him just happy that she’s home while the other is trying to simply prove something. He knows he’ll keep fighting for her because he is nothing but a boy and Katniss Everdeen is all he has ever known. But he also knows he doesn’t stand a chance.

vi.

(When she gets reaped again, it’s a different terror. It’s half-hearted and coarse and it keeps taunting him with the irony that _Johanna_ is also the last remaining female tribute from her District. And she stands there, on the podium of the Justice Building looking _so thunderous_ and _so awake_ , eyes gleaming with something that says _just watch me,_ he can’t help but to feel half feverish, half hollow).

(Gale’s reflection in the mirror stares back at him that day, looking pale and tired and his thoughts seem to hit the walls as it consumes him that _they_ might kill each other without either of them ever _knowing_ ).

vii.

The rim of the woods feels unfairly unscathed to him.

(The ashes of District 12 rain on them for days. Cover the ground white like snow. The children play in it. _The children play in it_ ).

On the third day, with the ends of a fishing net on his hands, he feels it – the fire, the tear, burring itself in his muscles, ramifying across his shoulder, and down his back. The first hint of a burn etched in red across his skin.

“Is it a soulmate?” He hears. A boy, barely 14, who’s helping him fish.

Gale nods through gritted teeth. Shirtless, in the smoldering heat the bombs left behind, he realizes his bruise is visible for everyone to see. The pain on his shoulder wanes because it’s just an echo of what she’s feeling. But the mark remains, angry and red. A painful reminder that knows that on her end things are different. 

“At least she’s on the right side.” Says someone else with eyes that pity him.

Rebellion is in the little things. It’s Katniss covering little Rue in flowers. It’s three fingers in the sky. A song. It’s Johanna Mason, telling Caesar Flickerman to fuck off – who allied to Katniss, who cursed at Snow and threatened a rebellion for him to see. The bitterness and the grit.

A rebel. Tortured because she actually knows rebel secrets.

Something tugs at him – a pride and a fear that seem to seep deep into his skin, deeper than the marks, twisting his stomach into knots.

He throws the net into the lake and buries the feeling deep within himself. But he is unable to stop it from taking roots.

viii.

District 13 is a cold and sordid type of place.

When the Capitol broadcasts yet another clip of Peeta, getting thinner and hollower, it feels like their failures are plastered to a wall and their meetings evolve as usual: Katniss cries, glares and screams and practically but begs for their earliest rescue, Coin nods condescendingly but she's much more interested in getting the rebellion going.

"Please. I think..." Katniss takes a deep breath, closing her eyes but some tears leak out anyway. "I think they're poisoning them." The eyes in the room widen immediately. "I don’t feel anything on my skin, but my head burns like crazy. " Her voice breaks. "They are killing him while no one but me knows. Please."

He thinks about it. It’s clever, really. Her face is immaculate. Every propo they make shows everyone that Peeta is being well taken care of in the Capitol.

His mind drifts to Johanna and the patchwork of burnt skin covering his torso, under the sleeves he keeps purposefully long. 

He takes a deep breath – not nearly deep enough to convey half of the dread he's been feeling for the past five weeks. His voice is slow but it does not tremble.

"Johanna Mason is being burnt, perhaps electrocuted." The name tastes bitter in his mouth; he realizes it’s the first time he’s saying it.

Everyone turns to him, stricken. All stop what they’re doing.

Katniss stares directly at him with a confused look etched on her face, as oblivious as ever. "How do you – ” But then stops herself. He keeps his face stoic and his words painfully clear, but her gaze softens and her eyes shine with something he didn’t think he would ever get from her. _Pity_.

He thinks, maybe, that something snaps within him. He spent his entire life expecting _something_ from Katniss Everdeen, like a never ending game he was always bound to lose. Pity, however, is a achingly sharp reminder that she’s irrevocably Peeta’s and that anything they ever had started and ended out as ill-fated.

He doesn’t know if it makes him want to hurl or scream.

Haymitch suddenly laughs, breaking him out of his angry reverie. It's loud and completely shameless, as if he finds the situation amusing, and earns himself some dubious looks from across the room. "Well I’ll be damned, the kid actually got herself someone as stupid as her.”

Gale doesn’t even have it in himself to feel offended before Haymitch continues. “And _they_ don't know?"

”They’ll know she has one,” Finnick intervenes, still looking appropriately solemn, yet with just a touch of _smug_. “Skin consistency is different for those of us bonded.”

Haymitch dismisses this with a wave of his hand, “Sure. But do they know it’s _him_?” _One of us._

Gale shakes his head, suddenly very aware he shared a five year secret with a room of people he doesn’t exactly trust. "We've never met."

(He guesses the odds aren't in their favor that they ever will).

ix.

He volunteers to go rescue them exactly 30 minutes after a gash appears on his forehead, just at the hairline. His skin tingles on where yet another burn spreads across his arm, ramifying from his elbow to his shoulder.

(When he leaves, Katniss is being prepped to shoot yet another propo on how they faced a Capitol attack without casualties. He doesn’t tell her goodbye, doesn’t really know how to).

(He wants so desperately to be selfless enough to be able to tell her he’s getting Peeta out _for her_. But he can’t. And he won’t).

It’s dark when they enter, and the atmosphere feels heavy with the sound of their feet echoing across the marble floors and the eyes of the entire District Thirteen riding on their success. Still, the building is practically unguarded and every fiber in his body screams that they are entering a trap. But he swallows the nausea back to the pit of his stomach.

(If Snow wants them to find them, he doesn’t want to think about what that means).

They find Annie's room first, and he can hear her scream her entire way to the hovercraft.

Peeta, they find unconscious and with a face that is much hollower than he what he remembers.

(He made it his personal mission to go get Johanna Mason out of the Capitol’s grasp).

His heart thunders down his throat, the heavy map of burnt skin that stretches across his torso throbs and stings. Lost to the commotion, like a fever, he feels it: the vacant feeling of _something shared_ and it’s as if he just _knows_ she’s in the adjoining room. He shoots the Capitol soldier standing at her door without feeling much remorse.

Johanna Mason is wide awake and screaming at the top of her lungs, but it’s a hoarse sound and it feels painful to his ears, like something beginning to rust. Her head is shaven clean and the hospital gown she's wearing is see-through enough for him to make out the hollowness of her figure – the heavy shadows in her eyes, the skeletal legs, the bones on her shoulders that stand out too prominently. Then, like it’s taunting him, on her skin, staring right back at him like he’s standing in front of a mirror: the reflection of his cuts, his burns, his scrapes, the pain mapped like trees all too palpable for him to see.

(Three truths, ranked by how much they rattle him:

3) There was a helmet. He left it on the hovercraft

2) The gash on his head is fully visible, hasn’t received the tiniest bit of care.

1) He doesn’t know why those two pieces of information feel like inconsequential shames).

He threads across the room towards her with a restless feeling growing in his chest and undoes the restraints on her hands and feet in a rush, a certain desperation to get her the fuck out of here seems to seep through his skin and onto the air.

(The bitter end: The minute their skins brush, it takes all the strength that’s left in him to stop his hands from freezing; touching her feels electrifying, like a soft buzz that tides over his veins, like crawling over to the shore, souls pulling towards one another).

( _Maybe he wants her to know_ ).

She doesn’t resist him, and he doesn’t expect her to; things had gone a bit haywire but the plan has always been to get all victors to the resistance as best a piece as they could. Instead, Johanna eyes him with a new found interest. She slings one arm around his neck as he lifts her up with more ease than he would have wanted, one arm under her knees, another at her waist.

It suddenly hits him that maybe he should have spoken a while ago, about where they’re taking her. "We're rescuing you and the others. We're taking you to Thirteen." He tries, with a bad throat clearing that makes him sound like a thirteen year old growing up near the woods and going through puberty all over again.

She doesn’t say anything, just keeps her gaze trained on him and he finds himself racked with the feeling that _she knows_ , _she knows, she knows_ and his heart thrums to the beat of it, buoyant and nervous. He locks gazes with her then, unable to ignore the fact that she’s pointedly staring, her brown eyes wide and rimmed red and the gash on his forehead starting to throb. With her good arm, she reaches out to press a finger on the wound hard enough for it to start bleeding again. Bleeding on her own forehead too.

He says nothing – he doesn’t think there’s anything he could say that can encompass this. Instead, he starts walking them towards the hovercraft.

Johanna, however, starts laughing, her whole chest reverberating under his arms with something that feels a bit too close to hysteria. "About fucking time."

x.

He's not sure what to do with her afterwards.

It’s the medical team that takes her from his arms, moves her to the makeshift burn ward and pumps her up with so much morphling that he can practically feel it oozing on his system as well.

(Later, in the hallway, as he watches her rip the tubes and needles sticking out from her arms from behind a glass door, he feels a heavy hand – as heavy as his father’s was – clutching him at the shoulder. Haymitch. “Careful kid. She’s a spitfire.”)

Katniss’ voice is strangled out of her, and he only finds it in himself to visit her at night, when it’s dark and she’s asleep and he doesn’t have to find the right words to murmur.

(He presses his lips to the skin between her eyes and pretends, _pretends_ , to feel something).

She leaves for District Two and he promises to be right behind her knowing he’ll be more shrapnel on her tired heart than anything else.

He distracts himself by spending most of his time awake with Beetee designing weapons he doesn’t really want to use. It becomes an oddly calming routine – doing what needs to be done.

(With her gone, he really isn’t sure who he is avoiding).

Instead, it’s Mrs. Everdeen who reaches him. Thinner than he remembers, the circles under her eyes darker. “Do you have a moment?”

Naturally, he expects the worse. “What is it? Is Katniss – ”

She shakes her head dismissively. “She’s-“ She pauses noticeably, reconsidering. Yeah, _fine_ isn’t exactly the word he would use to describe Katniss either. “She’s the same.”

He nods, shoulders slumping back a little with the lifting tension. But she continues. “It’s Johanna I want to talk to you about.”

Gale feels his blood freezing. This is somehow worse.

He feels his jaw clench, but lends her his best blank stare, “What about Johanna?” seems to be all he can say.

Mrs. Everdeen seems frankly uncomfortable. The scar at his collarbone aches as if knowingly. He’s been always thankful she never told Katniss – her secret almost as much as it is his, given how long she’s held it for him. She starts off tentatively with a sigh. “As you probably heard, she has been given a large dosage of sedatives to help her overcome some of the physical and psychological trauma. But she’s not doing so well.”

Gale is well aware his scowl is becoming more pronounced, even if Katniss’ mom doesn’t deserve it. “I don’t see what that has to do with me.”

(He does. Of course he does, his throat is hoarse from her screaming, his lips are constantly raw from her biting.)

She sighs. “Gale, it’s not her fault. She signed up for the rebellion just as you did.” She says earnestly, eyes infinitely wiser than he’ll ever be. “You know just as well as I do that physical contact between bounded souls works practically as well as morphling without the medical dangers.”

He feels his gorge rise. “Is that what you’re expecting me to do? Hold her fucking hand while someone else does the fighting?”

Katniss’ mom flinches at his words, and he regrets their harshness as soon as it leaves it mouth. “I’m not expecting you to do anything. I’m not asking anything of you either, I know you have a hard enough job as it is.” She shakes her head idly, eyes distant, another person on her mind. “I’m here telling you that we’re forced to cut down her morphling and she won’t make it like this. And I do know what it is like to feel your soulmate die on your own skin,” She pauses, and Gale remembers her yearlong depression and tries to nod apologetically, hoping it conveys the feelings he isn’t able to put into words.

Her gaze softens and as she puts a hand on his shoulder he is once again reminded that she has always, always, felt like a mother to him. “I am here telling you this so you won’t have to either.”

xi.

It’s late when he finally enters her room. The flickering lights of Thirteen barely just enough for him to make his way through the long corridors that all look the same, the smell of antiseptic filling his nostrils. He freezes on her doorway, wishing he was at least a little liquored up, before crossing the room.

Johanna Mason, sharp and spiteful, now looks devastatingly small on the bed, curled up in a ball, gnawing at her lower lip hard enough for it to draw blood on the both of them, the bag of morphling connecting to the catheter on her hand practically empty.

He sits on the small chair place by her bed, close enough to watch her lashes flutter restlessly and her eyes sonder aimlessly behind close lids. There’s something – a begrudging feeling that threads itself across his vertebrae – when he sees the familiar way her skin is stained. Brittle. Unyielding. Something that screams that this is all wrong. That he shouldn’t be here. _She_ shouldn’t be here.

Almost like a wounded animal, he lets his fingers find her gawky wrist. The feeling invades him immediately, as unrelenting as it was before, his fingers practically tingling with the current.

Her eyes snap open.

“So,” she starts, voice husky and smooth, “The Mockingjay’s hot cousin is the new morphling.”

He hadn’t given much thought to what she would say. This wasn’t it, though. “Guess so.”

She shifts her arm so he’s holding her hand instead of her wrist and he thinks he can hear his skin hiss at the contact. “And where is the Girl on Fire? Didn’t bother to visit her dying saviour?”

Gale grits his teeth. “She’s in District Two.”

She raises an eyebrow but her lips curl scornfully. “And left you behind? Seems like a tragedy.”

“If she’d taken me, you’d have no morphling.”

She grins half darkly, “Another reason to _love_ our Mockingjay.”

“ _Is there something you want?_ ” He asks rustily, but it isn’t even a question.

“What I want – ” She gives out a grimace of pain trying to adjust in the bed, and his hand in hers feels suddenly sweaty when she tightens her grip, “– is to know how you found me.”

He sighs, full knowing that she’s not talking about the rescue. He starts undoing the buttons on the shirt of his uniform with one hand.

She laughs then, shakily but still mean. “Are we skipping right to the fucking? Sorry to disappoint you, gorgeous, but I’m afraid I don’t have the stamina.”

Gale rolls his eyes and pointedly ignores her, his hand instead pointing to the familiar scar at his collarbone. “This one aired on live television.”

“Did it now?” She lets go of his hand to feel it, her fingers touching the skin at his neck tentatively, and his whole chest feels like it’s burning even though her hands feel brittle at best. “How romantic,” she whispers mockingly, but her eyelids flutter closed from the fatigue. “Another thing to thank Snow for before we blow him to pieces.”

And he almost laughs thinking she probably does have the stamina. “You should sleep.”

She ignores him, her mind elsewhere, eyes glassy and unseeing, “Why are you here?”

It feels like a dangerous question. One he doesn’t really want to answer. He’s not even sure he knows how to.

”Wouldn’t you be?”

She tilts her chin, half annoyed. ”You’re not answering.”

“Neither are you.”

“I’m a selfish person. I think I've earned that. And this - ”, she shakes their locked hands, “ - feels fucking amazing. I mean _shit,_ does it always feel like this?”

He knows exactly what she’s talking about – some sick twisted joke of fate that makes him want to keep her hand against his chest, pinpricks of emotion that linger on his skin and trail after her hands, as if their souls are humming. “I know as much as you.”

"Why? Doesn't dear Miss Everdeen make your skin tingle?"

Gale tries to take his hand off hers but she only grips him tighter. "Is that what we're calling it now?"

Johanna huffs. "Wanna slap a label on it and see if it sticks?"

"We haven't met," he tells her half abruptly, but it lacks conviction.

“I don’t know what you call _not_ _meeting_ but you gotta admit that the fact that I'm _here_ begs to differ.”

" _Properly._ "

"Other people already seem to know too much about me. Anything I'd be willing to tell you about myself probably already aired on TV."

He thinks there's probably nothing he could say that could argue with that. _Except that maybe she's the only person on the planet who could map out where each and every one of his scars lies if she cared to._

(Katniss limps ever since Peeta lost his leg. He wonders if losing _her_ would feel like losing a limb).

Johanna looks at him, _really_ looks at him – her eyes big and brown practically gouging out his body, and says, “I don’t have it anymore.”

“What?”

“ _That scar_ ,” She finishes, her hand starts trailing the mark again. “They took it out of me. Figured it wasn’t attractive enough. Their victors _have to be_ beautiful.”

He knows this, of course. Katniss had come back home with smoother skin than she’d ever been born with. “Some scars are good to get rid of.”

Her hand strays from the scar, starts trailing down the burn at his shoulder. “Some are good reminders.”

Johanna Mason. Tiny. Deadly. Spiteful and bitter. _Dangerous_ – with nothing left to lose.

He catches her hand with his before it deviates even further.

She studies him for a bit. “You’re different from what I expected.”

“What did you expect then?”

Johanna starts playing with the fingers on his hand with bored indifference, forcing him to be painfully aware that they are still clutching hands. She's pretty. Not in a sight for sore eyes kind of way - hardly anyone is after what she's just been through - but there's still something striking about her.

“You tell me, Hawthorne. You’re all the nurses seem to talk about. What can I expect?”

There isn’t much to think about. Gale Hawthorne. 20. A man – a _boy_ , a _boy playing soldier_ – half destroyed along with his own District. All or no parts worth redeeming. It’s a coin toss, really. “Depends on who you ask”.

“My mother used to think you built things. From the bruised fingers.”

(There’s something funny about the thought of his hands building anything but traps. There’s something even funnier about the thought of Johanna and her mother talking about him as she grew up).

“Hunting,” He clarifies with a just a tug of sadness. “You climbed trees.”

Her hand is warm, so warm he thinks she might have a fever. He squeezes her fingers.

“Isn’t it funny that if we were normal that’s where it would stop?” And her voice rasps over the words, like they’re some sort of avalanche.

( _They are_. He still pretends as if he doesn’t feel like every injury she ever had is tearing through him all at once).

xii.

He keeps coming back.

The heavy smell of disinfectant and the stark walls all seemed to churn inside his head, giving him reasons _not_ to come back. And it’s not like he owes her anything, and he feels absurdly out of place in the chair next to her bed trying to sleep.

(He doesn’t know why he keeps coming back. He can’t remember any other place he wants to be).

(Soulmates don’t have to be romantic. They teach you that in school. They’re just someone that’s meant to be in your life at one point or another. Maybe his part is done. Maybe he was always meant to save her and that was that).

Still, he holds her shivering hand while cold sweats grip her and she offers him every bit of profanity District Seven has to offer, feels her exhale in relief when their skins meet. Her trays of food linger on the bedside table, half eaten, and she’s a sick greenish colour by the time he gets there at the end of his training shift.

But Johanna, he thinks, is a conundrum poking fun at itself.

She’s battered and beaten, trampled into dust, like the world is pit against her, but most of all she’s _alive_ – abidingly _there_ in a way he doesn’t think he could be; she’s spiteful and loud and blinding and eager to get up and start fighting.

(He knows she sneaks up from the hospital during the day, strides up and down the corridors with shaky legs and he pretends he doesn’t see her when she shows up on at the door of the training room he’s assigned to and just lingers there, winking, taunting him in a way that he really _hates_ but also that can’t seem to leave him alone long after she’s gone).

Something settles between them.

By the third night, he’s lying on her bed because his neck dangles in the chair and the way she shivers on the bed does something to his cold sternum and he thinks she might _die trembling_ if he doesn’t hold her together.

(She says, _maybe you're more than just a hot cousin, maybe you're actually useful_ and it feels stupidly easy to tell her he’s only doing it because she looks terrible. But he feels her smirk against his shoulder, mumbling something like _get fucked_ ).

(Whenever he’s with Katniss he feels like a ghost. But with her he feels _something_ – unstrung and jumbled together maybe, like some of the heaviness is leaving his chest. Something different from an empty ruin).

(He thinks she’ll probably _be_ his ruin and doesn’t know what to do about it but to keep coming back).

She drools, all over his shoulder, entangles their legs and tells him his feet are cold. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.

(But she sleeps. And so does he. And in his dreams nothing is burning).

“Going soft on me, are you, gorgeous?”

Maybe he is.

Maybe that’s why he keeps coming back.

But he leaves, in the morning, before she wakes up and when the silence of the empty corridors makes his footsteps echo. He pretends he doesn’t see the odds looks Prim gives him when she sees him circling the hospital wing in the morning.

 _Soulmates don’t have to be romantic._ But he’s always bound to carry some part of Johanna Mason with him – held prisoner by her skin one bruise at a time. One war or another.

xiii.

Gale starts the conversation by purposefully ignoring the fact that she is lying particularly naked in his bed. “Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”

He tries not to look at her too much, tries to fix his eyes on the wall behind her – anything, he is fickle at the idea of letting her know how much she affects him – but he wrings his hands behind his back and he’s definitely weak in the knees. She’s beautiful in a way that aches. Even with the extensive scaring and her painfully evident ribs; slender waist and firm little breasts out-thrust.

Johanna eyes him conspicuously, something coy in the glint of her eye. “That’s not a great look.”

“What?”

She stands up then, makes her away through him on her way to his bathroom, sways her hips purposefully to give him a full view of her ass. “You’re dressed.”

(His eyes fixate on the faded echo of forty lashes forever whipped on her back instead).

He’s still dumbfounded by the door when he hears the water on his shower start running. He finds her looking at the rushing water like she’s never seen it before. “Is there a reason you came over? I mean, did something happen? Is something wrong?”

He wants to holler at the question as soon as it leaves his mouth, at how ridiculous it sounds when she’s just been tortured to an inch of her life and he prepares to kill what feels like hundreds of thousands of people to justify a war. She doesn’t answer, thankfully, but she does laugh – somber and without amusement.

He tries again. “Did they discharge you?”

Johanna sneers, eyes still on the water, one toe circling the drain. “You think? Head doctor still feels the need to say I’m very safe in all our meetings.”

She enters then, and for a second, he thinks he sees her flinch as the water hits her, but it’s gone so fast he isn’t sure it actually happened. Still, she holds the door of the shower for him, and the question is simple and doesn’t require any words.

(The answer is also simple, even if despite himself. He thinks this might be the least thought out thing he’s done, but he shucks off his boots and his clothes fall to the floor with a thud anyway).

Johanna, to her credit, doesn’t seem the slightest bit affected by him, or the fact that he’s naked. She finds a sponge as soon as he closes the door behind him and starts at soaping up her arms.

"You're staring."

"Hard not to."

This seems to please her. Johanna flaunts her body, starts scrubbing her breasts instead. "Why is that?"

"Hardly a normal situation."

Her hand lays tentatively over his bicep. “Thinking how you could have done worse in the soulmate roulette? She could have been ugly.”

Gale scoffs. It’s true but he’s not about to give her the satisfaction. “You drool.”

And Johanna glares like she doesn’t quite believe him, but when she turns towards the water he doesn’t miss how she grimaces. Under the steam, the burns on her skin look worse. Rawer. And Gale is unable to stop himself.

“What did they do to you in there?”

(And it’s not like he hasn’t asked it before. To the doctors, the nurses, when he left her off. In a tone that required some restraint not to sound distraught. But it’s still classified information and he doesn’t rank high enough to access it).

He hears her laugh through the water, but it’s still too raw, too lacerated. “Aren’t we supposed to do a bit of small talk first before I tell you all my deep dark secrets? Isn’t that how this works?”

He feels a little exasperated, a little contemptuous. Maybe he’s being too belligerent, but there’s something about Johanna Mason that makes it hard for him to just sit still. "I don't know how _this_ works. I suppose you don't either."

"You suppose a lot of things." She says, still holding the sponge, leaving him with nothing to do but stare at her open back. "Why do you care?"

"Why do _I_ care?" He feels like he might gag. “Well fuck me if I’m wrong Johanna, but I think if there’s anyone that deserves an explanation, I happen to _fucking qualify_.”

She turns back to him; lips pursed, lashes flickered. Their faces stand so close he feels their breaths mingle.

Then, with eyes and voice too clear, too defiant, she breathes into his mouth: “You’re wrong.”

(She kisses him too hard and without permission – lips catch between teeth for a brief moment, her starved breasts pressed against his chest, her ribs exposed. She is slight and he is careful with her, but Johanna Mason wasn’t raised to love tender, her hands rough, her movements knowing, and it feels all too easy to press her against the wall in tangled limbs and hips that move carelessly).

(He wants to say: _We shouldn’t be doing this._ But it dies, deep in his throat when she brushes her lips against the curve of his ear and there isn’t any part of him that doesn’t ring at her touch).

(He thinks he does it because he’s lovelorn).

(He’s wrong. He cannot stop thinking about her coming undone).

After, the water runs cold when they wash away the sex – bodies shivering and craving involuntarily – and she presses a finger against the familiar scrape that ramifies across his shoulder. 

“They used water,” She says simply, voice plain. It feels like enough.

(It is – and as the cold water sprinkles down her neck, he does not look at her in pity).

xiv.

The second time she shows up (dressed thankfully, because his mother had _just_ been there), he practically stumbles on the realization that she’s inviting him to get lost in her because she can’t shower alone. It’s an odd way of feeling used, but he doesn’t exactly begrudge it.

He stops asking questions after that, just lets his mouth roam her body. It becomes an oddly calming routine; the plump curve of her lips, the sudden jarring of teeth, the nails digging in his collarbone and the neck bites mirrored back on his skin.

He can’t help but think it’s strangely unfair that the water on her skin looks like pearls.

She runs a soaped up finger over the fading lashes that stretch across his back, mirrored on hers. Her hands are careful and quiet, and _un-her_ , meandering their way and leaving a trail of fire where her fingertips meet his skin.

He finds himself leaning into her touch. “Guess I should apologize for that.”

Johanna’s hands stop and everything suddenly feels cold. And when she speaks she’s every bit as abrasive, as unkempt as he’d always expected her to be. Every syllable thrown at him with repulse.

“If you’re expecting _me_ to apologize, you’re barking at the wrong fucking tree, Hawthorne.”

“I’m not,” He drawls out quietly, but it’s drowned out by the rushing water. “I thought you weren’t allowed to keep them.” He thought she _wouldn't want_ to keep them.

He turns to look at her, Johanna looking all too petulant anyway. “I guess I told the doctors to fuck off.”

“Why?”

She simply shrugs, and he almost laughs thinking that he might like this – whatever it is. This carnal and weirdly codependent affair between them. Their half-finished conversations, like fingertips leaving indents on his back.

He ends up taking the sponge from her hands and rubbing her arms in slow circles, her skin slick and burnished with the water.

“I brought a turkey to a peacekeeper’s house. Didn’t realize the usual peacekeeper had –” He kisses her neck, “ – moved.”

Johanna laughs wryly but he feels her hands tightening their grip on his shoulders, “Moved is a great word for brutally killed.”

“Yeah, well, public flogging is the punishment for poaching in the Districts apparently. I passed out after twenty lashes I think, give or take a few.”

Johanna tilts her head away from him so suddenly he feels cold. The absence of their touching skins like a fist to his sternum. She takes the sponge from his hands and turns towards the shower-head instead, leaving him to think he said something wrong.

“I don’t know how many I made it, “ She starts, nonchalantly, and he feels his blood freeze. But she carries on like it means _nothing,_ rubbing the skin of her stomach a little harder than she has to. “Fifteen or so, maybe. Passed out right in the middle of the market at home. Woke up in some doctor’s house who didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.”

(They moved him on a table board back to Katniss' house and he only remembers groaning when the liquor hit the wounds, his mind entirely blank except for the pain and the thought someone else was feeling it too).

(There was never some colossal guilt about having put her through it. There was never anything. The pain was unbearable and back then it was easier not to think about Johanna at all. They were never going to meet. _He didn't want to meet her_ ).

(He remembers Katniss' mom whispering _She's strong,_ and him having absolutely no doubt on who she was talking about. He also remembers not having the strength to tell her he didn't care).

(Johanna keeps her back to turned to him and he keeps seeing those goddamn scars splashed all over her pale skin).

This is is different. This is real.

He knows - _she knows_ \- that it's not like he had a choice. He knows her well enough by now to know she doesn’t want his apologies.

He says what matters, “We’ll make him pay for it.”

But she’s not done yet.

Johanna turns around.

“When I woke up I thought –” She runs a hand over her scalp as if forgetting there isn’t any hair. “ – shit, I don’t know what I thought. That you died, I guess. Everything was so quiet and so still. And I don't know what you're supposed to feel if and when - " She gesticulates with a trembling hand, "But I don't know, it was like I was empty. For days I, - I even missed the god damn ache in your lungs from the mines, I - You scared the living shit out of me."

Gale steps a little closer to her, and his mouth twists a little in a vain attempt at keeping it from dropping.

But Johanna carries on.

“And it wasn’t that I thought particularly about you. I mean, I’ve been fucked over so many times. The games, my family, the fucking prostitution –“

“ _Johanna._ ”

“ – but then you had to go and get flogged, for fuck’s sake. And I keep thinking, it’s like I’m a walking curse. No one even knew you existed and look what happened to you anyway.” She's practically howling, her wry laugh reverberating through his whole chest.

He’s unable to stop staring at her, moth to flame, the water starting to run cold under his neck, and she doesn’t look racked or defeated, but like someone who made peace with her fate.

_There’s no one left that I love._

_(It makes him wish he could rub the grief from her skin as if it were a stain)._

“At the quell, I – I was going to die. I couldn’t –” She takes a deep breath, lays a hand over the skin of his chest and he finds himself brave enough to cover it with his. “I thought if I did it – this – you could have some sort of … choice. You know, not the mines and the whippings. Should have guessed you’d be in the rebellion as well.”

He wants desperately to say something, anything. But under the weight of her words, he finds none of his own. “Johanna, I –”

“Shut up.” And she’s not looking at him, her gaze fixated on their hands on his chest instead. “We’re going to be fighting together. I just thought you should know.”

(He kisses her precisely because he doesn’t know what to say in coherent words. Because _no one_ has ever done anything for him like this and he doesn’t think he can afford to think about Johanna Mason like _that_ ) _._

(They move like old lovers. And they blur together under the running water, crashing their mouths against each other, his hands tracing the line of her waist with burning fingers while Johanna grasps at his hair in hunger).

(They’re soulmates. Neither of them has fully come to terms with the word yet. But everything else just feels incidental). 

xv.

A few things about Johanna Mason;

She’s outward and loud. Blunt, perhaps even too much, but not caustic enough. A certain unabashed, unsubtle, dry wit smeared over every comment. She laughs sardonically, like she can’t believe how stupid you are. She swears a lot.

She’s small – too small, almost two heads shorter than him. Sometimes he finds himself having to double glance her because she barely reaches his shoulder. He only notices it after too long because she’s got more nerve than anyone he has ever met. Katniss’ bravery comes when prompted, Johanna’s is always on full display, _angry and awake,_ ready to stomp you when it hits. They eat side by side in a dining hall where gazes circle them incessantly, a new found attraction in rumours in a world where the star-crossed lovers just became painfully morose.

(His mother always said that word spreads fast in small towns. He figures District Thirteen doesn't exactly qualify as a small town, but the last time the nurses tried to force bathe Johanna, he felt her panic so agonisingly deep in his chest he practically broke the door of her hospital room. Johanna is vomiting what little content is left on her stomach out of sheer panic by the time he manages to get inside the room, two nurses trying to hold her on each side. They leave when he asks them to - the soulmate card too big for any of them to downplay - half of them giggling, half of them scared and one with a broken nose. And the rumours, he presumes, start there).

He becomes pliant when it comes to her – gets this nagging sensation deep enrooted in his chest that compels him to go check on her from time to time, save her the desert he doesn’t eat because she looks too damn skinny.

(Whenever the Capitol broadcasted Peeta, Katniss used to say he was still trying to protect her, that he _was still playing the game._ He used to think that was a load of crap, that Peeta was just trying to save his own skin and nothing else).

(The day he ends up bathing _her_ with wet wipes and trembling hands on the bathroom floor, rubbing some cream over the scars on her naked body while she grips his arm and pratically _heaves_ at the touch, _he finally gets it)._

(And _fuck,_ does it scare the crap out of him).

They're hardly anything. Just two people and _a bunch of bruises in between them_. Casual and cruel and _there_ when they need to be.

(Peeta renounced everything he believed in thinking it would help save Katniss. He doesn't know if he would ever do the same. And that’s what scares the crap out of him. The fact that _he doesn’t know_ ).

(He just knows he doesn't want her to _look like that_ ever again).

He expects her to be a mere shell of herself, war-torn. She isn’t. She’s smoldering, simmering, a full wildfire – more fiery than Katniss sometimes, whose storm-grey eyes drown out the flames. Johanna’s eyes are brown and flecked with gold. They’ve seen too much.

_(They do not cry)._

He says, _All that hate is going to burn you up_ , like he himself isn’t in love with the idea of taking down this world to start anew, like he doesn’t _understand._ She looks at him lasciviously, offers him a mean little smirk and flicks her lips, _Nobody wins the games by accident_.

(Sometimes he wonders if they are too similar; too eager, too categorical, too impossible. He doesn’t really know how to answer himself. Thinks they might be too caught up in each other for him to be able to tell).

She’s jagged edges, razor-sharp, violent and beautiful. He used to think she was just damaged goods but it is not just her that dreams of dead children and burning fields.

(It's always been him that can’t handle the seasons of his life).

He expects _them_ to be bittersweet bedfellows, like fragments of bullets lodged in each other’s heart. They’re not. They're finishing each other's sentences by now. Too familiar too soon.

(He never stands a chance inside the four walls of the shower).

(He covers her scalp in foam to make her laugh. He succeeds sometimes. Other times she just yanks at him half viciously. Not that he minds, either).

xvi.

On the last day before he’s supposed to meet Katniss, he finds a way to sneak them smuggled liquor.

(It’s probably not the most responsible thing he’s done, since he’s leaving tomorrow at dawn in a hovercraft full of sober people, but when he sees the guys of a battalion coming back from Ten trying to hide entire crates of alcohol behind the ammo, all he can think about is Johanna laughing and telling him she even misses cough syrup. So he just stashes a bottle under his jacket and walks away faster than he should).

Johanna lingers at the door to his compartment – barefoot, the boots dangling from her hand, the customary District Thirteen uniform hanging loosely on her small frame, a belt tied so tightly to her waist that it makes her look invisible. She’s taken to sneaking out of her hospital room at night and he cackles when she tells him that the nurses absolutely hate her after the broken nose incident.

(She doesn’t tell him that the hospital makes her feel like the war’s unfinished meal. But he knows).

(Maybe that’s why he brings her the booze. Because she’s standing at his door precisely the day before he’s supposed to leave like it means nothing and her eyes light up _before_ she actually sees the bottle).

(He is unable to pinpoint when he actually started caring for her. Maybe it was weeks ago, but he calls her Jo and it practically rolls of his tongue like he’s been saying it his whole life.)

(She doesn’t badger him about it either).

So she lays down at the foot of his bed and wrinkles her nose when she tastes the liquor on her tongue. “God, that’s terrible,” But takes another sip anyway.

He has to agree, but it’s not like he ever had anything but the crappy white liquor coming from Twelve. “You really want fancy Capitol booze?”

“Even the stuff from home was better than this.” And when she laughs, it sounds a bit forlorn.

“We’ll get you back there.”

It’s a simple promise. One he doesn’t know if he can keep. One that makes him wish for something softer than all this bruised longing they have.

She turns to look at him, only to find him staring right back at her in one of those looks that probably speaks volumes, and it feels like they’ve stumbled across something he can’t quite put a finger around. But it lingers, coarse and unrelenting.

“I told my head doctor about you,” She suddenly states, looking vaguely bored, the stained grey cotton top of her uniform riding up as she sits. “He kept asking how I felt about hurting you unintentionally. So I just told him you were fine with it.”

He can’t help but laugh at how idiotic the whole thing feels. _Fine with it_ has to be the understatement of the year. Soulmates in a war, paired up like it was something empty, like love is nothing but wounds and half-lives. “And what did he say?”

“He says _time will heal us all._ ” She scoffs, but she’s wringing her hands in her lap. “What do you think, Hawthorne? You think time will heal us?”

“I think your head doctor is an ass.” He lets her foot rub against the side of his leg, the soul bond making his skin tingle. “I think time is part of the damage. We all burn alone.”

He pretends not to see her gaze soften. Sympathy they don’t deserve but want anyway.

The lights go out, and he hears her shuffling on the bed to put her drink on the bedside table. The silence becomes painfully loud. Then, she breathes: “Do you love her?”

 _Katniss._ Who the war faded away. And him, who chased an idea; who just longed for a place to belong. Both nuisances to each other.

“No.” And he realizes he means it. Everything is easier said in the dark. “We’d destroy each other.”

Johanna’s voice is low, curling deep in his gut. “Would we?”

A thought bigger than his own head remains. It’s the conversations that stretch out his patience but that keep him sane, tethered, rooted. It’s the easy affection between them, the casual, effortless touches – their bodies practically mere extensions of one another. The way his skin tingles, alive under her callused hand.

The way they click. Alive in a broken world.

But it _is_ a broken world, and he is leaving tomorrow with a plan he justifies with necessity and good intentions. She’ll also join the fight, in the Capitol maybe, when she’s strong and her hands steady enough to hold a gun.

He’s suddenly stuck with the sad premonition that everything is short-lived. And that they aren’t an exception. “We don’t have to be anything.”

(The words pinch him from the inside. But that doesn’t make it any less true).

It’s her that ripples the waters. “We _aren’t_ anything.”

“ _Jo.”_

The bed shakes as she moves so they are lying side by side, their shoulders touching slightly. ”What _are_ we then? Some _lovesick_ teenagers trying to define what the fuck we’ve been doing?” 

Gale sighs, his hand itching out to reach her. “Aren’t we past that?”

“Are we even there?”

He knows she feels his gaze on her but she doesn’t elaborate.

There are a lot of things to say, and his skin keeps tingling at the contact of their bushing shoulders _like it all means something_ and he's _tired,_ so _damn tired_ of walking on eggshells around her. So, after a while, he adds: “Does it have to matter?”

”We might not work,” She answers, her words raw, her voice impossibly soft, while still hooking one of her fingers through one of the belt loops in his pants.

”It’s not like we don’t share the same pain, Jo.”

Johanna sneers. “Like that somehow doesn’t make it worse.”

Her words hiss through the air and hover over them ominously.

“Would you rather -," Gale swallows dry, " - we never met?”

Johanna’s hands over his jeans freeze momentarily. _“Fuck you,_ Gale.“

He doesn't know how to answer his own question. He doesn't even know why it bothers him so much that she can't answer it either. He's known about her for years, but Johanna didn't even know he existed until weeks ago. 

Johanna moves so that her head is resting on the soft spot of his shoulder, and it feels uncannily natural to him to place his arm around her. “I don't -" She takes a deep breath, "I don't care about the scars. I don't care about the pain.” She grabs his hand over her shoulder and clamps her fingers over his like they’ve been doing this their entire lives. “The people I loved were never mine to keep.”

(He thinks they are soft, in a way only lovers are, in a way that crawls deep under his skin and makes him a little bit in love with her and her broken pieces. Gale thinks he’s always wanted to be gentle with a girl, and she’s anything but).

(But it’s been three weeks. And they’ve always been good at making their own rules).

He places a kiss on her temple. 

She twists so that she’s facing him, breasts smacked against his side, one arm threading over his chest. “Help me stay awake,” she states, the words spoken low.

He feels the liquor oozing through him making him drowsy, if not sleepy, and he’s once again reminded that he’s leaving at dawn and this whole thing might be a terrible idea. That Johanna Mason herself might be a terrible idea, an haphazard he isn’t able to get past.

“Why?”

(And he thinks he might need to hear it).

He feels her face press against his shoulder, the corner of her lashes fluttering against his skin, her voice small, barely even audible. “So you won’t leave while I’m asleep.”

A thought lingers at the back of his head, that he might not make it back from Two. That the world might burn before he gets to see her again.

( _If_ he does).

“I’ve never been good at goodbyes.”

(Aren’t they too young for this much heartbreak?)

“I don’t want your goodbyes,” She says irrepressibly, and he’s reminded once again of how strong she really is. How _inescapable_. “Save them for when one of us is dead.”

xvii.

He does go to Two, shares some precarious kisses with Katniss with the goal of making them both feel better and instigate something he no longer feels, but it’s just a hollow attempt at hiding the chagrin. He tells himself it’s the soul bond making every other touch feel hollow in comparison to _her,_ but deep down his chest thrums with something that can only qualify as _regret._

(He can’t get past the nagging thought at the back of his skull that he can’t sleep properly without her and that he really doesn’t want to find out what her face looks like when she’s disappointed).

(More than anything, it feels ironic that maybe Johanna ruined him for everybody else).

In the end, Katniss gets shot and two things collapse: a mountain and their relationship.

(He only mourns one of them).

There was no passage left open for the people of District Twelve. They never had a chance.

(Call it retribution, call it collateral damage. She wasn’t there. She doesn’t know what it looked like, what it felt like – the hum of the planes, the claustrophobia growing on his chest like rubble).

(Katniss’s eyes look at him aggrieved and the conversation he had with Johanna plays on his mind on repeat – that Katniss and him keep breaking each other and calling it love).

He’s half out of it when they get back to Thirteen, a bit foggy with morphling and with the constant pressure of hands fiddling over his wounds. There’s this image of his father replaying on his head, his words harsh; _don’t start what you’re not prepared to finish._ He thinks he’s detaching from the person his father had known, and he doesn’t know how that makes him feel.

He’s sitting on the edge of the hospital bed with Prim trying to bandage the wound on his shoulder when he notices Johanna leaning against the doorframe, looking irritantly bemused, the hint of a bandage hiding beneath her shirt as well.

She looks healthier, despite the heavy circles under her eyes and the dirt under her fingernails that tells him she hasn’t showered. He thinks, just for a second, that he likes to see her like this – hair starting to cover her scalp, some muscle in her legs, mocking him for an audience to see.

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Stop looking at me like that. I don’t bite, you know?”

He doesn’t realize he’s looking at her in any way particularly, but he feels his lips curl into a smile, still a bit drowsy from the morphling. “Yeah, you do.”

Prim’s hands shift uncomfortably against his shoulder, but this doesn’t bother Johanna in the slightest, who grins, her hands on her pockets. “I didn’t see you complaining.”

(Their entire relationship seems to be made up of showers and dark places, and he finds himself hungry for both).

“I came in to check if you needed some morphling, but you’re all set,” she says, wiggling her fingers. He keeps hoping she’ll cross the room but she stays put.

He moves his arm for Prim to see, hating the way his skin stretches, and she makes motion to leave once she’s happy enough with the result, but Johanna stops her by the door, a hand gingerly on her arm. “Better give your sister a little more something. She keeps screaming, it’s hurting my ears.”

Gale figures they now share a hospital room and doesn’t really know how to process that information. He sighs, thinking that is bound to be interesting when he visits her. _Any of them_ , really.

Prim eyes her strangely before nodding curtly and leaving them be.

Johanna’s eyes flicker involuntarily to the concrete under her feet. “Your _cousin_ is my new roommate.”

He feels weightless, he supposes, from the morphling. It was just enough for them to take the shrapnel out of his arm and stich back the cut on his shoulder, but still be feels loose and uninhibited. “I don’t care.”

The hard lines on her face soften. “You don’t know that.”

She looks earnest and gentle in a way he doesn’t deserve. He wants to tell her he’s sorry for the wound on her shoulder. Wants to ask if she woke up alright, if she slept alright. Wants to tell her that these past few days have felt like hell, futile guilts and the unimaginable distance between their skins.

He hears his father again, blurry and nauseatingly calm; _don’t start what you’re not prepared to finish._

He _missed_ her, he realizes.

“Stay,” He hears himself say instead, because he doesn’t know how else to put it.

(He used to think she was raw at the edges, but he wonders if that’s isn’t him instead).

She does stay. And he feels himself drifting to sleep as she runs her knuckles across the skin of his arm.

(He wonders if he’s feeling what Johanna feels for the first time; that she is infinitely more consoling than real morphling will ever be).

He waits days before he has the guts to visit Katniss after they get back, because it’s one thing to learn to live with her indifference. He still doesn’t know if he can learn to live with her distrust.

But Johanna is there, eyeing him with something that looks like trouble in her eye and he can’t help the smile on his face. “Your cousin is not afraid of me,” She says with a wink and nudges his hip with her own as she passes him on the doorway. “Are you, gorgeous?”

Katniss looks captivated by their interaction and he thinks back a little wistfully on how it used to bother him, but they’re past that. “Did you guys ever talk?”

 _About the marks. About the pull and the ebb._ It remains unsaid, but he hears it. As loud and irrepressible as her laughter on the corridor.

“Did you and Peeta talk about it?”

She presses her lips together, the pearl twirling between her fingers. “That’s different.”

“Is it?”

xviii.

She’s living in a compartment with Katniss when he enters without knocking – her, sprawled on the bed, feet dangling in the air, enumerating war tactics as if for an exam – and she looks up and says, “You stink,” like it’s some sort of unspoken agreement.

He scoffs, but his mouth is bent into a smile anyway. “You’re one to talk.”

(It is).

“Dick.”

(She says this was her only ticket out of hospital – and as he watches her and Katniss train each other, look after each other, rise each other up, he can’t help but think _good._ Because he can’t _)._

(Secretly he’s also a little wounded she never asked _him_ ).

He takes to entering the shower before she does, getting the full blast of the burning water across his face while she gets mere sprinkles. Still, she winces, jaw clenched and eyes shut. And he cannot take that away from her.

“I hear you’re getting better in training,” He says against her shoulder.

Johanna curls her lips, "I could axe you in half."

"You probably could, yes."

She scoffs, but he nibbles her ear so it sounds more like a groan. “I’m not incapacitated, Gale. I’m just – _fuck_ “

“You’re just _fuck_?”

“Shut up.”

He laughs, remembering he came in here angry and sore from the training, thinking that her touch, her warmth would probably be better than to just sit there and hear his thoughts hit the walls.

That that night he dreamt it was his hands holding her underwater, and he watched with some conscious horror as the water engulfed her, swallowed her up, her small hands fighting him and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. Like his hands weren’t his own. And when he wakes up, heart pounding in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and trembling so violently that it feels like he was the one to drown, the first thing that comes to his mind is the fact that Peeta ruined himself trying to protect Katniss until they destroyed him.

He wasn’t wrong, her touch and whatever abiding attachment there is between their two souls does help. But it’s more than that, anyway.

“I ate Peeta’s stew today.”

“Good,” He says because truly he is glad, but then again he’s kissing the inside of her thigh when she speaks.

“Yeah well, he and I shared a wall. I think I’m entitled to his stew.”

He looks up and tries to sound and look annoyed but there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his lips because of the domesticity of it all and he’s never, _never_ , had that before. “You wanna keep feeling guilty about the stew or do you wanna let me do this?”

He doesn’t think someone can look so soft and so alluring at the same time, but her eyes shine like two whirlpools and her hands sink into the tender flesh of his shoulders with a hunger he’s learning to live with. But she smirks, and says: “Men were always terrible at multitasking.”

(It hits him then, like something protruding out of his chest, that life without her – in the _before_ – was dry and stale and he cannot breathe when she presses his heart).

xix.

In the dark, he finds her clinging some bundle of pine needles and cones to her chest.

“Sons of bitches flooded a street,” She admits bitterly, without looking at him and with the corners of her mouth pressed tight.

He knows, of course. It’s not like he hadn’t been expecting it really: in a simulation targeting weaknesses, her familiar wince as the water hits her comes painfully unencumbered. Still, he hadn’t expected it to trigger a flashback large enough to need sedation.

(In a normal world, a soulmate's panic should be unfamiliar. They don't live in a normal world - he knows Johanna's panic like the back of his palm. When he feels it – hollow and unforgiving, growing like a cancer across his vertebrae, he is overcome with a surge of protectiveness that made him want to shove Plutarch against a wall. It takes him by surprise, really, the way he immediately rushed away from training to search for her. She was sedated, of course; and he really doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing there because she’s sedated. But he sits on the ground of the hallway in the hospital wing. Trying to compensate for some sort of absence).

So he’s here again, sitting on the edge of her bed, the chair long forgotten, and his hand itching to reach out to her but he doesn’t want to seem too condescending. “At least you got morphling again.”

She detaches the catheter from her arm unblinkingly and clenches his hand to the point of pain. “Yeah, well, the morphling doesn’t help with the nightmares.”

He’s not sure he does either, the way she trembled under his arms back at the hospital what felt like eons ago. But he moves by instinct and lays next to her on the bed, one arm around her shoulders. She laces their fingers in response.

“Something is eating you alive,” She says then. And it isn’t a question.

(He supposes he should be used to it by now, how fast she sees right through him. With Johanna a hint of a touch always seems to be enough to shatter half of his defences to the ground).

(The cruel thing is that the myriad of things that seem to be eating him alive doesn’t end with the fact that she’s lying like a portrait of trauma in a hospital room again. He thinks with a certain emptiness racking his chest that the bombs are ready, placed in little parachutes; long lost hours of sleep packed and ready to go to the Capitol with them).

(It makes him feel not entirely here, a ghost; one foot down on his grave but not quite buried yet).

Johanna shifts to be able to look at him, and all he seems to think is that too much of him remains.

“You know there are some records of soulmates speaking telepathically.”

She harrumphs. “My head doctor would just _love_ that.”

It’s not that he doesn’t want her to know. But wording it means processing it in a way he doesn’t really want to. What’s there to say anyway? _I might be doing something terrible_ resonates at the back of his skull, but what does he want? Her accusations? Her pity?

“Do you think I’m heartless?” He asks her instead, hiding his face against her hair.

(And he thinks, maybe, that somehow her opinion matters more to him than Katniss’ ever did).

Johanna doesn’t take any of his crap and cranes her neck to look up at him. “Do _you_ think I’m heartless?”

There's the sudden, distant memory of her axing four kids across the chest, blood matting her hair. But that's not what resonates louder. It’s the look on her face when she hears her name in the lips of a crowd during her victory tour. The way her hands trail the lashes on his back, her soft eyes, a certain tenderness that pierces his heart. She’s more than the past that clings to her skin. “I think you’re the furthest thing from heartless, Jo.”

She settles back on the bed. “They really did a number on us, uh?”

" _You_ really did a number on me." And Johanna chuckles, like the thought doesn't bother her in the slightest. He feels her head dropping on his shoulder. "Sometimes I think you're gonna be the death of me one day."

“Did you break a hospital door again?" And when he doesn't answer she laughs. "Sometimes I think you’re gonna wreck your pretty little heart every time I almost die.”

He scoffs. “You didn’t almost die today. It was a simulation.”

She offers him a bemused smile. “You’re still here.”

(He can’t really argue with that. He circled the hallway for two hours while Finnick and Katniss were here. Not that he’d ever let her know that, either).

His fingers meander down her skin, careful to avoid the havoc of tubes and needles sticking out of the veins of her arm. “Do you wish you died? _There_?”

“What’s with all these morbid questions?” And then she laughs, but it sounds glum even to his own ears. “I can’t decide yet. Ask me again later.”

Gale nods against her hair. He knows odds are he might not come back from this. Back here. Back to her. And even if he does, nothing will quite be the same.

(But he’ll ask it. Later. When the unthinkable is not so hard to swallow and when his heart doesn’t feel like it’s breaking into splinters).

She frowns. “God, I’m so fucking tired of laying here in this stupid bed.”

“Want me to talk to someone?”

He knows he can’t stop her from fighting, knows she deserves this probably more than anyone. The Mockingjay could pull a few strings, Soldier Hawthorne could too.

(He’s not sure he wants to, though. And he would never tell her that because this is a war they were both meant to fight. Somewhere deep ingrained in his chest there's this _need_ to keep her somewhere she'll be safe. But it’s not like he can protect her from the horrors of war).

(He has this recurring nightmare where the earth slips – a mountain – and a crowd of faces distorts with anguish, suffocating as land crashes down on them like waves. He tries not to think about their faces, he can’t really tell them apart. But he knows she’s there anyway, he hears out her screams, calling for him to make it stop as the earth engulfs her).

(He doesn’t tell her that either).

She shakes her head, her voice breaking across his thoughts. “Better not. I might jeopardize the whole thing if they use water on me again.” She gives his hand a squeeze. “We all burn alone, Gale.”

There’s some wrecked reverence in the way he looks at her, at the echo of his own words, it’s probably what swallows him whole. It makes him wish the room wasn’t so dark so he could stare at her and tell her that he’s wanted so many things in his life and she makes him want _more_. “No. We don’t.”

(If there’s anything left to say between them, it’s that).

Her fingers tighten on his hand with more strength than he thought she would have, and he squeezes it back, as if he knows she needs something to ground her. “Make sure she kills him.”

He nods solemnly. This is as close as revenge as she’ll ever get, and he plans on giving it to her as best he can. Even if he doesn’t come back from it.

Then, in the dark, almost as if she’s thinking the same, her fingertips find his chest, lays a hand gently over his heart, and he feels it thrumming beneath her fingers.

“Be careful out there, Hawthorne. My skin is bruised enough as it is.”

xx.

The nights in the Capitol lack something. Some warmth they always showed on TV. People in colourful wigs smiling and wearing short sleeves because they can adulterate the weather according to their desires. He wraps his jacket a little tighter around himself knowing perfectly well it won't do anything.

Caesar Flickerman looks solemn but relieved on the screen of the house they managed to find to spend the night, the color vanishing from his hair. He reads a news report that the rebel traitors are dead and smiles a little. Then, with some perverse irony, they show their faces on the screen like they're tributes in the Hunger Games.

_Gale Hawthorne. District Twelve. Traitor._

He doesn’t really know how to feel about it - but there would be some pride in it if he wasn't so damn scared.

Finnick actually laughs a little when he sees his own face. Almost like it's something he's been waiting to see for a long time - longer than Gale might understand, he thinks. Then, he takes out a knife.

Gale watches him half perplexed as Finnick cuts through the skin of his thumb just enough for it to draw blood. 

_Annie. He's letting her know._

"She'll be mad if you don't give her any news, you know," he says without really looking at him. He extends the knife anyway.

Gale feels the tip of Johanna's fingernails carving themselves into his palm - way ahead of him, asking, pressing him for news. He knows. Of course, he knows. He can practically picture her, fists clenched, leg bouncing underneath the table.

He takes it, some brazen desire to _just get back to her_ finding its place in his chest even if tomorrow’s ground remains too uncertain for plans. He finds Finnick smiling back at him, rebellious and real and _not really altogether there_. Gale feels like he’s getting some sort of undeserved appraisal, but afterall Finnick has known Johanna longer than anyone else still alive. 

He cuts a millimeter worth of skin on his index finger and waits a minute, letting it sink in. Then, one double the size stings and etches itself on his middle finger and he has to laugh.

"She's always mad at me."

xxi.

He gets back from the Capitol burnt and shot at but still in one piece and walking in on his own two feet, which is more than he can say about half of the team that left with him.

(About Finnick, whose body may never be recovered).

(About Katniss, who comes in half catatonic, some part of her forever lost to the war).

He sees _her_ first, lip bust open and _so ridiculously skinny._ But she's still elbowing her way through the dense crown till she basically throws herself at him, feet off the ground, practically straddling him and curling her arms around him hard enough to bruise them both.

(She limps - as does he, the result of that God forsaken activation pod that nearly killed him - and he doesn't know if it's permanent, if they just became half as tragic as Katniss and Peeta. But _God,_ she's rushing to him anyway and he finds himself picking up the pace too to meet her halfway, and it hits him then that this is why he fought so damn hard to come back).

“Missed me that much?” He whispers tiredly but with a hint of mirth anyway when he feels how hard her fingers curl into the fabric of his jacket, and he can't find it in him to ruin the moment with an apology she doesn't want or an explanation he has time to give her later.

“You fucking idiot,” she whispers against his neck and his burnt skin complains every time she tightens her grip on him, but Gale feels something tugging at him again, a warm trickle rattling his ransacked chest cavity, something that thrums in his chest that _isn’t guilt_ for the first time in weeks.

 _It’s the soul bond_ he wants to tell himself, but it isn’t. It is half of his heart walking around on her body like it was always there to begin with. And it doesn’t stop him from hiding his head against her shoulder and wrapping her a little tighter.

xxii.

It’s not until later that the guilt finally consumes him, the cold weight squeezing his chest.

The parachutes, the explosions. Bloated bodies cluttered on the concrete. Unseen hands dragging him towards the chaos. Prim. Soft, sweet Prim, and the echoes of everything she won’t ever become. A woman. A mother. A doctor.

Always Prim. Burning. Screaming.

She’s eternally more terrifying in his nightmares than she’ll ever be in reality.

He wakes up in cold sweats and with a scream climbing its way out only to find Johanna slumped on the chair next to his bed, small, barefoot and with her knees pulled up to her chest in a vain attempt to keep herself whole.

He smiles tiredly, almost as if in a daze, wonders for a moment if he’s actually hallucinating her. He considers not waking her, but everything feels too fragile and ephemeral. His eyes lazily trace her features – the spiky hair, the furrowed brow. Like love is a quiet thing. “Hi, Jo.”

She stirs, half asleep, runs a hand over her eyes to wash the remains of somnolence and gets up, a shirt that he isn’t sure is his slinging off her shoulder. “Scoot over.”

He obliges, and she fits herself around him with surprising ease. He feels her cheek resting against the top of his head and one arm threading over his chest, careful to avoid the skin grafts on his burned skin.

Gale closes his eyes, exhausted, letting her warmth soak through his pores. He thinks, sadly, that red is the only color he will ever have on his hands and stifles a sob against the curve of her neck. He doesn’t even remember the last time he cried, really cried – but he’s crying now, more primal and devastating than anything he’s ever experienced. Hollow and jagged for the painful echo of what the Everdeen sisters could have become. In the dark, Johanna’s arms encircle him a little tighter.

She doesn’t say anything – there’s hardly anything to say. Instead she tentatively runs her knuckles along the skin of his forearm and tightens her grip on him whenever it feels like he might be falling apart. There’s a somber kind of quiet to it – haunting and fragile, but they linger. Against him, her heart beats strongly, arhythmical, grounding him to life.

xxiii.

Later, in the chaos; a body hanging from the veranda, another laughing itself bloodless. Katniss screams for him to kill her, her face huge on the screen for the whole world to see.

(He tries. But roots grow from both ends and every fiber of his being is screaming that he did this to her. Katniss screaming and his mind is a blank shell on a gun that doesn’t work. A poor excuse for a hunter. A poor excuse for a friend.)

His hand reaches involuntarily to where the cyanide capsule dwells on the patch of his shoulder. Shots get fired and the crowd grows restless, but he’s numbed to the turmoil. When the world ends, how quietly do you deserve to go?

It’s a nice thought, selfish even. A quick and easeful end is more than he deserves.

(Still, this – a paper-thin skin – isn’t just his to bear anymore).

Fingers clamp into the flesh of the hand at his arm with an iron grip. _Johanna_ , soft and disarming all at once as the gold light of the end of day breaks behind her; who looks at him undaunted and _so sad_ he feels his breath quiver in his lungs.

He makes a choice then, and it’s inconsequential but he thinks it’s the first easy choice he’s made. Johanna, more redeeming than he deserves. Johanna, who welds him back together. 

He tangles their hands. The knuckles on her hand are bruised; from him, from her, he cannot say, but it doesn’t really matter. He kisses her knuckles like she’s holy before taking her hand and leaving the war with her.

xxiv.

Leaving turns out to be a more difficult than he had anticipated.

On paper, the head doctor himself – Dr. Aurelius – grants him enough mental stability to leave, but he is fickle to do the same for Johanna, to say the least. In the end, she gets a warning and an “unfit to live alone” bumper sticker on her case file while all eyes turn expectantly to him.

(She never asks, but it’s not as if he could say no to her anyway. Not when she’s that excited at the prospect of leaving.)

He refuses anything to do with the military and Johanna is outright desperate to start anew. So when they get offered government jobs headquartered in District Two, Gale figures it is appropriately as far as humanely possible from Twelve and Thirteen as he can manage.

(Sitting at the back of his head, there’s always the Seam, grey and peaceful. But there’s also the famine and the fire, and the ashes that he’s sure still cover the soil. A part of him that he left there that he can never get back. But when he thinks he’s just a soldier with no home to go back to, Johanna laces their fingers, shrugs and says _if you’re going_ ).

(So they leave. The Capitol, Thirteen. The war. Gale has a rucksack of things he salvaged, Johanna with the clothes on her back and that bundle of pine needles and nothing else. When he asks her if she wants to get things from District Seven, she shakes her head, eyes heavy and with the gaping hole in her heart on full display and says it would feel like a vine around her throat).

(They have about 10 things between them. But a lot of good people have started with less).

(He knows no one leaves the war. Johanna hugs Peeta before they leave, gives him a paper with an address and a phone number and Gale doesn't have in him to argue. He shakes his hand too, a new found respect for him he knows isn't exactly mutual. But Peeta is kind, too kind, even after everything. And they are, after all, battered souls).

(When Katniss asks him questions he doesn’t know the answer to, he doesn’t linger at her door. He’s never been good at farewells.)

He settles his mother and his siblings in a little house far too distant from the district capital and that his salary can pay so that he doesn’t have to keep asking for their forgiveness.

(He keeps waiting for everyone to look at him like he’s tainted, but it’s the pity in her eyes he can’t take).

Johanna comes with him, dressed in a colorful wrap dress that hugs her figure and that almost makes her look _normal_ if not for the hint of burn scars visible under her cleavage. He realises he doesn't know whose burn it is. He realises it doesn't matter.

( _What?_ , she asks when he stares more than he cares to admit.

_”Nothing. I just didn’t take you to be a dress kind of person.”_

_“What do you know? You’ve only ever seen me bald, bloody and in uniform?”_

_”And naked,”_ he adds.

Johanna snorts. “ _Isn’t that love?_ ” She whispers half mockingly, but through their intertwined hands he feels her tensing up.

Gale looks at her then, and his heart tells him something he already knows. He squeezes her hand. _“I like it.”)_

(He never asks her to come, but it’s not like Johanna to ask for things anyway. And he’s thankful, since his mother doesn’t really know what to do with her and it serves him to avoid having any meaningful conversations he doesn’t think he can handle).

(His mother made her dress. That doesn’t matter either).

Goodbyes are hollow, he thinks. Except, Posy is six and doesn’t understand why he’s leaving, and he doesn’t have the heart to tell her the house she’s in is standing on top of a graveyard because of him. Out on the back, he overhears his mother’s hushed tone and Johanna’s foot ruffling against the worn asphalt creating miniscule pebbles along with it.

”Life has not been kind to you, girl.”

Johanna laughs softly. “It hasn’t really been a smooth ride for most of us still standing, I think, Mrs. Hawthorne.”

He hears the tap running. A glass settles on the wooden table. ”Do you love him?”

”Mrs. Hawthorne, I-“

 _“Hazelle. Please._ ”

There is a pause, and Gale pictures her, earnest eyes and slightly parted lips, probably running a hand over her short hair. "He's as much my family as he is yours."

A chair creaks from where his mother sits. “I – I know he talks to you. And you don’t have to tell me anything, that’s not –,” The screen door taps. The wind whistles its discontent. A mother that cannot stop mothering. Even if it is as if her son murdered a sister. “What I mean is – don’t break his heart. I don’t think he can take it.”

There’s an even longer pause, and Posy twitches restless in his arms but he’s too stuck in the conversation to let her go.

Then, in a tone that makes his stomach clench: “Maybe he’ll break mine.”

xxv.

A few things about Johanna Mason;

They get a government assigned apartment as soon as they qualify for jobs. Something simple. A building wedged between a pharmacy and a boarded up florist. If anything, he would describe the apartment as sinewy, and Johanna seems to agree as she feels for the walls. There's high ceilings, brick walls and it's high enough for the people to look like ants from the window. That’s just as well, he hasn’t really grown used to having so many eyes trailing his every move, like goldfishes in a bowl.

(The star-crossed lovers live in seclusion. It’s the former victor and the war hero that decided to live in the city. At least that’s what they call them in the papers anyway).

(They get war money, compensation-for-your-efforts money, compensation-for-your-trauma money. Gale doesn't really care for what they label it as. Everything feels like blood money to him anyway. He gives away his share to help build the medicine factory they're planning for District Twelve. Johanna keeps hers. It buys them their couch).

So they get a couch. And two beds, but only ever use one. He is unsure which one of them is unable to sleep alone. Or wake up alone. But the house has windows now, and he can’t help but think Johanna looks better here, like this, scarred skin threadbare, light drenched, sprawled naked on the bed. He doesn’t even remember how they ended up in bed to begin with since it was her idea to christen the house and they started out in the kitchen counter, his hands undoing her bra for her. The vacant memory of hungry hands and their lips burning crosses him briefly, but it’s nothing compared to the feeling of Johanna unraveling beneath his fingers.

Everything else just falls together.

She fills their entire apartment with plants that are not really edible so he doesn’t really see their point but he doesn’t say anything. She get hired as some sort of architect, to help with the rebuilding because she understands about framings and beams and all those sorts of things. She likes pulling off the dead leaves off trees as they walk by to work. He learns the names of the trees because she knows them.

She likes fancy liquor – old habits left over from her years at the Capitol, he guesses – but her eyes shine, unbridled, when he brings home shitty wine, anyway.

She’s contemptuous, unyielding, this unkempt thing; words too futile to describe her, what she means to him.

She travels, a lot more than he does, because the cameras love her and she has years of practice of knowing what to say. He goes with her sometimes, they visit Annie and the baby and he watches Johanna dip her toes on the sea with heaving lungs.

Little Finnick wails, blue eyes wide and demanding, when he gets a random scratch on his chubby leg, one that wasn’t his doing, and they all hold their breaths. There’s something about it, some hesitant whisper of hope, of love, like a promise that maybe their efforts were enough.

It’s Johanna that places the band-aid, and whispers something like _they’re out there somewhere_ and he feels like his life has just come full circle. They get back home with skin sticky with saltwater and memories he thinks he’ll miss someday.

(When Johanna goes to Twelve, he doesn’t follow. But she calls, when it’s night on her end, and falls asleep on the phone).

Gale grows a scruff, and her hair grows, bobs at her shoulders, loose and messy. He likes threading it with his fingers.

She does cry. Wounded, in erupting sobs that seem to fester agonizingly deep in her chest. When she wakes up, she stifles the screams into her pillow.

(He is racked again with the idea that they’re just broken creatures. That no one leaves a war unscathed. That there is a mountain inside of him and that the color bleaches out from her face when it rains. But he came to District Two, maybe, he thinks, to make amends and she forces herself out of the house anyway).

“Hey, Jo?”

They’re in the balcony after work, the twilight lit up by the occasional flickering light of the closest lamp post, and the cold wind burns their cheeks. It’s small, and it feels even more crowded with the chairs she carved, but she took up smoking and she laughed and laughed when he practically coughed up a lung trying it, and the only thing that rattled his mind is that he’s probably ridiculously in love with her.

Inside, their house looks like a mess – half packed suitcases, clothes lying on the back of sofa chairs, train tickets on top of the living room table. The TV plays softly on the background, some news channel counting down for the anniversary celebration of the end of the war this weekend, and Gale finds himself romanticizing other people’s view of celebrating something nice. The sunshine feels like an insult, he thinks, but he’s glad for her. They wouldn’t go if it was raining.

She hums some form of acknowledgment, looking pensively at the street – a cigarette between fickle fingers.

“Quit chewing your lip.”

She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Shit, sorry.”

He reaches towards her slowly, his shoulder grazing hers, their hands just barely touching. “What is it?”

“Do you like it here?” She asks, her voice sounding a little bit wrecked, reminding him that really sometimes these questions are just another way of them asking if they wished they died.

“Yeah.” He likes the city, and how normal people from Two just seem to own cars. And the coat on his back is wooly and warm, with plated buttons and a mandarin collar. Something he would never be able to pay for not with years worth of savings in Twelve. Now it's from the store just downstairs. 

He grew up on the country side. He reckons there’s too little of him left out there now.

(His father used to say that people travelled the world to find home before they realized it was more than a place anyway. His has started to smell like lumber, concrete and like the cable-knit sweaters she wears sometimes).

“Is this about tomorrow?” He asks her softly. “We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.” And it’s true. If all he has to do is stand on a platform and look solemn, then he can do that from home.

She shrugs. “Maybe, I don’t know. It’s just –” She turns to look at him, her eyes tinged with something sad. “Another set of Games. With Capitol children. What do you think of it?”

“What?”

She shifts her gaze back to the street and brings the cigarette to her lips. “A year ago - a year ago today, actually - Coin asked the victors to take a vote. A stupid thing. It was supposed to be symbolic – taking Capitol children instead.”

He’s never heard of this. He doesn’t think it’s something that’s his to hear anyway, but it still feels like someone is pouring salt in an open wound. “So?”

She puts out the cigarette on the balcony railing and turns to look at him, craning up her neck and he’s reminded once again of how small she actually is. “I voted yes. Snow had a granddaughter."

He feels her dark eyes search his. For judgement or consolation he cannot say, but the feeling is troubled and her mouth twists with something that makes his chest pang. The question remains unasked, and it's not like Johanna to ever ask it, proud as she is. But it stays: _What does that make me?_

“You're not heartless, Jo. You were angry,” He says, instinctively pushing her hair away from her face, keeping his hand on her cheek. “It makes you human.”

“Would you have?”

Gale thinks about the Capitol bombs, the burning skies and the ashes. The bloated bodies of Capitol children littering the streets, their screams ringing on his ears for days on end. What he did, and what he would have done again. “Yes,” He answers her. “Does it make a difference?”

“Not really. But I murdered those children, and you built those bombs. Maybe being there is the best we can do.”

Nothing about her words feels particularly new, but he’s still unable to stop the shiver that runs through him, even if he has grown to know Johanna enough to know that there is no accusation on her tone.

“Maybe. I keep waiting for the War Crimes division to come and get us.”

(All his life he wanted to leave. Leave home, leave District Twelve, leave the hunger and the war. Have children and start anew somewhere else. Now that he's there, he can't bear the thought of having children. He keeps imagining having explain to a child - a _girl, a girl with eyes as wide and as deep as Johanna's_ \- what he did. He keeps imagining her having to live with it as if it were her weight to carry). 

“Hey,” She says, and catches his hand before it falls from her face, twines their fingers together. “I’m sure she stopped blaming you. There was a plan. Deep down even Brainless herself has to know that a lot more than her pretty little sister would have died if we hadn’t done it.”

He nods vacantly. He doesn’t think Katniss has stopped blaming him, doesn’t think she will anytime soon – and even if she did, he knows there’s only so little her forgiveness would change things. Because his mother is still ashamed of him. Because there is no regret.

(It’s guilt, he thinks, that is the war’s collateral damage. Prim, Katniss, Finnick, Boggs, and thousands of others he’s tried to put names to the faces still stuck on his head).

(Johanna knows this too. It’s not like either of them dodged the blast).

(Maybe, he thinks, it’s about the selfishness of making an event like this about themselves).

He wraps his arms around her – they’ve always wrung their heads too much – and this, _them_ doesn’t feel bittersweet. He rests his chin on top of her head, her hair smelling like a blend of herbs, something floral. Her fingers find the skin beneath his shirt.

“I like it here too,” She starts, a little too much feeling in her voice, “A lot more than I planned.”

They’re still two different people in a District different than the one they knew before. A different sense of home. And a victory they cannot stomach. He squeezes her a little, heart drumming. “Umm, I like it better on the bed.”

And she laughs against his chest, soft and redeeming.

There are words that slip from his fingers and some that don’t. He says, “I don’t care how complicated we are”, against her hair. And it stays.

xxvi.

“What’s on your mind, Jo?” He asks, voice thick with feeling and the bitter taste of alcohol on his tongue. There’s an open bottle of liquor from District Twelve on top of the kitchen table, one they always open after her monthly phone sessions with Dr. Aurelius. She hates them, but even she has to admit it beats going to the Capitol.

“How Katniss ever let you go,” She slurs, half way towards drunk, slinging her legs around him on the chair and eyeing him so lustingly he can’t help but think he’s royally _fucked_. “Shit. I can’t believe I just said that. I must be drunker than I thought.”

Gale laughs quietly, the echo of something fluttering in his chest – he’s also a little drunk but he doesn’t think that’s it. It makes him wonder if that was one of the topics Dr. Aurelius pressed her for. Katniss is – and probably always was – a burned bridge, and she’s long gone. Sometimes he wonders even if she was ever really there. Johanna, though, looks at him like she can see his soul and picks him up from the floor on his worst days.

He touches his fingertips to her temple as she fiddles with the hair at the back of his neck. “Well, she did find her soulmate.”

She flinches but doesn’t pull away. Instead, she puts her forehead against his, and her voice comes out small instead of spiteful, out in the dark, in a kitchen they didn’t bother to light up. “Is that what we are then? A bunch of _bruises?_ ”

Gale thinks about it. Johanna imprinted all over his skin – so much more than simple bruises – how they managed to find some sort of peace after everything, how their evenings stretch out long past bedtime, restless and loving. Souls woven together down to the marrow, always bound to be _something_.

“I’m not here for the marks, Jo.” And then, the words thunder deep down his throat: “You’re the best thing that has happened to me in a long time.”

“When did you become so corny?” She scorns, but even with his eyes closed he manages to hear the smile in her voice. “That almost sounds like a marriage proposal.”

He feels himself freeze, the hand that had been playing with the hems of her robe stops unwillingly before he recomposes himself. When he speaks, his voice doesn’t sound like his own. “Do you want to get married?”

With their foreheads still touching, he feels her little shrug like a small calamity happening inside his chest.

“Do you?”

He feels a bit dizzy, a bit lightheaded. His chest burns, the only thing that seems to ring through his head is the fact that _she’s not saying no_.

He won’t lie to her, he has thought about it. He thought about it when they went to the anniversary memorial for those who died when the Nut collapsed and she held his hand throughout. He thought about it when she sat cross-legged in their bed, scarfing down the last of the take-away because she burned down the dinner she had been trying to make because he got promoted. He thought about it every single time he walked with her under an umbrella over the past year.

He doesn’t really know how to word that, the whole feeling pins him as overwhelmingly selfish, like something too sacred to voice out. So he just shrugs lightly too, his heart ringing in his ears.

Johanna tightens her grip around his neck. They’ve always been good at unspoken conversations.

“What, are you gonna prop down on one knee for me now?”

“You’re sitting on top me of me.”

“You can’t possibly be complaining.”

”Definitely not,” he chuckles, but his voice trembles half nervous, trying to keep it nonchalant, wading off the false hope. “But we’re drunk.”

“ _We’re not,_ ” she presses, and he feels her lashes flutter, her warm breath against his cheek when she speaks. “Not enough to regret it in the morning, anyway.”

And he almost laughs because this is Johanna Mason and this is her way of _asking for something_ without having to hound it out of you.

“Do you even want me to get down on one knee? Do people even still do that?”

“God, no,” She says pulling away from him slightly but keeping her arms around him. He opens his eyes only to find her studying him for a reaction, looking all too bashful nonetheless. “I can’t believe we’re discussing marriage.”

”Well, we’re not really discussing. We’re shrugging a lot too.” _Skirting around the edges of what they need to say, anyway._

“Doesn't everyone think we’re supposed to speak with our skins or some idealistic shit like that? Do I need to bring you that gossip column that talked about us _not speaking_ at the market again?” 

Gale swallows dry. "Doesn't mean we don't have to talk about _this_."

Johanna edges closer to him, tightening her grip on him with her tights. He's not gonna survive this conversation for very long. " _Oh?_ And what exactly is _this?"_

" _This._ Yes. Us and _marriage_ and _\- "_ He sighs, "Oh you're making this so much more difficult on purpose. _"_

She laughs, breezily, warm agains his cheek. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in white. There. That's talking.”

His hands tremble slightly. Only slightly. He hopes she can't tell. ”Does that mean you don’t _-"_

_(She can always tell)._

Johanna grips his bicep. " _Gale._ ”

” _’Cause_ it’s okay if you don’t want to. We’re fine like this. More than fine, actually _-_ “

” _Gale, stop_.” Johanna frames his face with her hands, her eyes lazily tracing his features and it's enough to stop his rambling. “ _I_ brought it up. I-” She breathes. "I might want to."

He smiles. "Might?"

Johanna hits him on the chest with enough strength to bring a dead man back to life and he feigns a little grunt in response, which makes her smile. "You think Peeta and Katniss had this much trouble just talking about it?"

Gale ponders it. "Probably." Katniss never did really talk much. Or at all. "But Peeta is probably much better than I am at handling the _not talking_."

Johanna eyes him with interest. "You'd know _that_ if you came with me with to Twelve."

The idea still sends shivers down his spine, but there's something else now too. Some concession. "You know what? I just might."

She leans forward and kisses him, closing the distance between them. It’s a tender kiss, tenderer than what they’re used to, her mouth still bitter from the liquor. He feels her fingers tangle in his hair, her nose gently grazing his when they come up for air.

“In Twelve we – ” He starts, letting his eyes brush shut again, his mouth feeling stupidly dry. “When a couple gets married, there’s this thing they do. This tradition. They light up their first fire together in their new home and toast a bit of bread to share.”

Johanna plays with the hair at the back of his head. "And when they're done, they're married?"

"Well yes. To them, they are."

(Truth is, Gale had always looked up towards marriage. His parents had always made it look like it _so easy_ , soulmates or not. The simplicity of a toasting and the clandestine glances of lovers sharing their first bread, not everyone could afford that. But now, said aloud, he realizes it sounds kind of stupid. Especially given the fact that they they’ve lived there for almost two years and the house doesn’t even have a fireplace to begin with).

Johanna eyes him half longingly, half pensively. Then she gets off his lap and starts walking towards the door.

“What are you doing?” He asks her, his tone a bit panicked that neither of them are the most emotionally stable people and this is exactly something that might qualify as _the wrong thing to say_.

She turns to look at him as her fingers find the light switch by the door, the kitchen lighting up at exactly the right time for him to see her shrugging casually, a contemptuous grin forming itself on her lips. “We have a toaster.”

He stares at her for the longest time, a smile threatening to split his face, and when he opens his mouth to speak only air comes out.

Johanna snorts to mock him and moves towards the kitchen counter, her grin growing wider anyway. Fonder.

He gets up from the chair after a moment, the air still knocked out of his lungs, his stomach twisting nervously and feeling like he’s 11 all over again, heart alight, discovering he has a soulmate for the first time. He joins her as she cuts two slices of bread with trembling hands and places them in the toaster.

“I’m not taking your name,” She says out of nowhere as they wait, but inching closer to him and grabbing his hand.

He laughs, unbridled and carefree. And he feels so overwhelmed with love it almost feels tangible, like it’s dangling out in front of them. “I don’t care,” he tells her, and leans down to kiss the soft spot of skin between her cheek and her ear.

There is violence in reconstruction. There are burned bridges and crumbled mountains like scars that ramify across his shoulder blades – across hers. There are people that meet like things pulled from the wreckage. The waste and the lies, the mistakes he’s made, some of which don’t deserve forgiveness. Some that do. He’s made his peace with it.

Johanna tightens the grip on his hand as if she knows when his mind drifts away and he’s once again reminded that bitter wars have soft epilogues. That she’s here and it feels like some concession to the injustice.

That they’re alive. And still holding out for more.


End file.
